We've waited a long time for a proper follow-up to the original The Bard's Tale trilogy, so after taking inXile's latest foray in dungeon crawling for a spin, Val set out to craft a full four-page review of The Bard's Tale IV: Barrows Deep. Here's a bit of what to expect:

The game's four classes are the Bard who drinks lots of booze and buffs the party, the Fighter who hits things with other things and moves other combatants around, the Rogue who exchanges opportunity points for damage, and the Practitioner who casts spells and wins you the game.

Each class has access to a few dozen skills. Each time a character levels up, they get a single skill point. Some skills raise attributes, others grant active abilities, and others yet give powerful passive bonuses to those active abilities.

The skills are divided into three tiers and are arranged into distinct skill trees, so that in order to get to the stronger skills, you have to specialize your characters in certain ways. On top of that, some of the skill trees are connected by dotted lines, which means that skills in that particular tree are mutually exclusive.